Relative times are not a good idea

Bug: Cannot determine the date/time a post or reply is made. It only shows "hours/days" ago
Expectation: It is currently 1:22pm. Exactly what time is 4h ago? No guarantee it is 9:22am. What date is 11h ago? I would expect posts and replies to have a non-braindead timestamp, like '25-May-2014 1:23pm'. I don't expect to have to do mental time-based math to know ALMOST when something was posted.
Solution: default date/time format should not be "[x][unit] ago"

Bug: Cannot determine the date/time a post or reply is made. It only shows "hours/days" agoExpectation: It is currently 1:22pm. Exactly what time is 4h ago? No guarantee it is 9:22am. What date is 11h ago? I would expect posts and replies to have a non-braindead timestamp, like '25-May-2014 1:23pm'. I don't expect to have to do mental time-based math to know ALMOST when something was posted.Solution: default date/time format should not be "[x][unit] ago"

I am not seeing this as a bug. This is so simple, a kid in standard 4th can figure out. I asked my cousins' son who is in 4th standard and he said 11 hours ago means yesterday.

Edit: Also if you take your mouse and move it over the <1m, you'll see a date and time.

This also adds useless computational complexity to the whole thing, because some computer somewhere has to continuously do all that complex subtraction math and imposes a need to refresh the view. Simply showing the post time & date avoids that nonsense.

My work PC has a quad-core Xeon E5 CPU in it and Discourse still feels slower than a 2001 website on a Pentium III.

I think you're speaking in hyperbole for effect. I am finding this to be super fast. I am on dual core Generation 2 Pentium chip. So if you're truly slower than 2001 website, then I am feeling sorry for you. If you're using figure of speech for effect, I am going to have to learn to take everything you post with a pitch of salt.

Nagesh, I'm personally disappointed that you've found the move as a personal motivation to post way more than you ever used to on the old site.
Please do us a favor and stop - you're not helping anything or anyone.

Hover over the Xh/Xd indicator - a tooltip comes up giving the time to the minute.

Hover tooltips is not nor will ever be a solution to anything regarding functionality or required information dissemination. It doesn't work on touch devices. It takes (mouse movement time + hover time + comprehension time) * (number of posts), whereas just having the information on the screen is near instantaneous. And the information is obviously right there!

If this becomes a configurable option, by default it should show full date time, just like all forums in the existence of whenever. Configurable options are great and all, but the goal should be to have the default be in "least surprise, most familiar" mode. If I, as a user, have to change and maintain this ever-growing list of "options to restore base functionality" on every single Disc-Course forum I encounter, I am not going to want to use any. And this is already a borderline hard sell. Don't make it harder.

Actually I don't agree: I don't give a rats ass if that was posted at 10:49am or 10:39am. First: were I live we use a normal, easy system called a 24 hour clock. So for me am/pm requires mental power. Second: I just don't care, what I do want to know however is: was this long ago or recent. Today or yesterday? Are we talking about hours or minutes ago? I don't wan't to know exactly when ... that way I don't have to look at my clock and/or calender to figure out what day & time I have now and then do some calculations and judge if this counts as 'not long ago' or 'long ago'. Even SharePoint does this now and I wouldn't call that hip or trendy. It's just more in line with how normal people think about time: not absolute like a clock but more with descriptive categories. If you ask someone the time you most likely get a response like; around a quarter for 11 or a bit for 11 and not 10:39. What's more: if you hover over a time indication you get the exact date and time. So if you really want to know if the post was made during lunch brake or at night you can still find out.

I thought we had that discussion already? For your convenience I'll post my answer again.

You're only talking about one particular post. What's your solution for deciding which of two post was made earlier, when both are 3 h ago (and made in different topics)? And please don't mention tooltips in your answer, they're not available on mobile devices.

Are you saying it never does? Why have time-stamps at all, then? Clearly, just "recently" and "long, long time ago" should be enough for everybody!

If I have two posts that were made in August 2010, do I really care what nanosecond they were posted at? Generally only the largest nonzero unit of time is needed to get a reasonable idea of when something happened.

Generally only the largest nonzero unit of time is needed to get a reasonable idea of when something happened.

Ugh... I even tried to sleep on this, and it doesn't make more sense now. So: WTF do you mean "largest nonzero unit of time"? Isn't this "third millennium" for every post in here? Or even "first exa-second"?

Hm, or maybe sleeping on this actually helped: did you mean to talk about time difference? Because that is very much a subjective opinion, TYVM...

Hm, or maybe sleeping on this actually helped: did you mean to talk about time difference? Because that is very much a subjective opinion, TYVM...

Well yes, of course it's the time difference. Otherwise we'd be talking about something like “in the 14th billion year period since the big bang” or equally useless noise. For what they're doing (which perhaps should be desktop only) showing just the largest unit of the time difference makes a bunch of sense; anyone who truly insists on knowing when a post was made exactly has the info as a tooltip.

But why you'd care about the fraction of a second where a post arrived at the server, I really can't pretend to guess.

That's the one I approve of; nice and visible and discoverable, all things that mark good user-oriented design. (I'm not 100% if the image used is the best one — it conveys linking but not sharing — but I'm not convinced the other alternatives I've seen elsewhere are better, so I'll give a free pass on this.)